Old Rightist Voices Against Atomic Mass Murder

Patrick J. Buchanan has rightly called the atrocity that occured sixty-three years ago today "terrorism on a colossal scale" — Hiroshima, Nagasaki & Christian morality.

Ralph Raico rightly said, "The destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was a war crime worse than any that Japanese generals were executed for in Tokyo and Manila" — Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In his article, the author quoted several other contemporary Old Rightists and others:

Admiral William D. Leahy, Truman’s own chief of staff:

[T]he use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. . . . My own feeling was that in being the first to use it, we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages. I was not taught to make wars in that fashion, and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children.

Major General J.F.C. Fuller, one of the century’s great military historians:

Though to save life is laudable, it in no way justifies the employment of means which run counter to every precept of humanity and the customs of war. Should it do so, then, on the pretext of shortening a war and of saving lives, every imaginable atrocity can be justified.

The Paulist priest, Father James Gillis, editor of The Catholic World and another stalwart of the Old Right:

[The bombings were] the most powerful blow ever delivered against Christian civilization and the moral law.

The distinguished conservative philosopher Richard Weaver was revolted by

the spectacle of young boys fresh out of Kansas and Texas turning nonmilitary Dresden into a holocaust . . . pulverizing ancient shrines like Monte Cassino and Nuremberg, and bringing atomic annihilation to Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Leo Szilard, the world-renowned physicist who drafted the original letter to Roosevelt that Einstein signed, instigating the Manhattan Project:

If the Germans had dropped atomic bombs on cities instead of us, we would have defined the dropping of atomic bombs on cities as a war crime, and we would have sentenced the Germans who were guilty of this crime to death at Nuremberg and hanged them.

"Mainstream American conservatives – not leftists, as we are led to believe – have been among the most vocal critics of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima," noted Leo Maley III and Uday Mohan — Conservative Revisionists and Hiroshima. They, too, offered abundant quotational evidence:

On August 8, 1945, former Republican President Herbert Hoover wrote to a friend, saying:

The use of the atomic bomb, with its indiscriminate killing of women and children, revolts my soul.

David Lawrence, the conservative owner and editor of U.S. News, said that talk of "military necessity" will

never erase from our minds the simple truth that we, of all civilized nations … did not hesitate to employ the most destructive weapon of all times indiscriminately against men, women, and children.

Henry Luce, the conservative publisher of Time, Life, and Fortune, said the following in 1948:

If, instead of our doctrine of 'unconditional surrender,' we had all along made our conditions clear, I have little doubt that the war with Japan would have ended soon without the bomb explosion which so jarred the Christian conscience.

As late as 1959, the National Review was able to say the following:

The indefensibility of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima is becoming a part of the national conservative creed.

Times have changed, and Messrs. Maley and Uday point out that "conservative commentators" now "denounce any and all critics of the atomic bombing of Japanese cities as 'left-wingers,' 'self-haters,' 'wacko communists,' 'ultraliberal Americans,' 'idealistic fools,' and (one of our favorites) 'peace-at-any-pricers and ban-the-bombers.'"